


Force Balance

by ignipes



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-03-02
Updated: 2005-03-02
Packaged: 2017-10-02 22:37:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They live happily ever after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Force Balance

Remus Lupin found an adjustable spanner in the kitchen sink and felt a relief so powerful it was more akin to joy.

He lifted the spanner carefully and examined it in the early morning sunlight. In addition to dirt and motor oil, the tool was coated in a thick, red substance with a distinctly magical feel and - Remus sniffed cautiously - the slight smell of raspberries. Remus set the spanner down in the sink and wiped his hand on a dish towel. He spent thirty seconds debating whether or not to fill the sink with water before deciding that he really ought to have learned his lesson from the Curious Incident of the Peg-'Em-Up Paste and the Pine-Scented Mrs. Scower's Magical Mess Remover. Sirius had only recently stopped cackling madly whenever Remus offered to do the dishes.

In this house, Remus thought, no good deed goes unpunished, and no magical concoction goes unexploded. He smiled to himself. Why would anybody want to live any other way?

Leaving the spanner to ooze in peace, Remus made tea, filled two mugs, and pushed open the door into the back garden. Pausing with one bare foot on the wooden step, one bare foot in the cool grass, Remus remembered suddenly that he hadn't locked the back door the night before. He waited for the sudden rush of panic, the sick feeling of guilt and fear that he had gone to sleep while their home was still vulnerable.

But the feeling did not come. After a moment he exhaled slowly and walked across the lawn toward the shed.

He could almost hear it in his mind, the click of yet another piece of his life falling back into place. Too often he had felt like a jigsaw puzzle whose edge pieces were lost under the sofa cushions, a statue eaten away by weathering and vandals until the face was no longer clear, or a stained-glass window so marred by damage and grime he could barely recognise the scene.

The scattered pieces, shards of months and years and decades, were only just beginning to fit again, and Remus felt it in these small, satisfying moments of _rightness_. He felt it when he honestly did not remember whether the shirt he wore was his or Sirius', when he knew within moments of arriving home just what culinary adventure had died a fiery death on the stovetop, when they bickered over stupid things like damp glasses leaving rings on the table, when they lay tangled together so closely every breath was matched, every touch warm and welcome.

And he knew it when he found an adjustable spanner in the sink and knew at once he'd been silly to worry when he awoke and found that Sirius was gone.

The door to the shed was open. Music drifted into the garden; Sirius was quietly singing along about how he got by with a little help from his friends - painfully off-key, of course, but at least the birds weren't complaining yet.

Remus leaned in the doorway, a warm mug in each hand, and watched. Sirius' old toolbox - which Remus had never had the courage to throw away - had belched its entire contents onto the wooden floor of the shed. Scattered amongst the tools and gadgets were various parts of the Black Shadow. The motorbike had been collecting dust for nearly twenty years, and it no longer started, much less flew. When they had brought to the cottage months ago, Sirius had simply shrugged and shut the door to the shed without looking back. The Black Shadow gathered a new layer of dust in its new home.

Then, a week ago, Sirius had brought a motorbike magazine home from the book shop. Remus hadn't said a word. Nor did he comment when Sirius dragged him to a Muggle hardware shop on a some unspecified but vastly urgent mission. Wandering amongst the nails and screws while Sirius spent an hour debating with the shopkeeper about the advantages of various ratchet sets, Remus had said nothing, but he let himself smile.

He smiled again, now, though his brow creased in confusion.

Sirius was sitting in the middle of the shed, surrounded by a jumble of tools, dwarfed by the magnificent form of the Black Shadow, reading a thick, heavy book. A quill and a bottle of ink were on the floor beside him, along with several sheets of parchment covered with what appeared to be equations and diagrams with a lot of curvy arrows.

Remus stepped into the shed and set one of the mugs on the work bench.

Sirius looked up finally and grinned. "Moony. This is _brilliant_!"

Remus raised an eyebrow. "Figure out how to make it work again?"

"No!" Sirius replied cheerfully, gesturing at his copious notes. "I've figured out how to make it work _better_. Look." He scrambled to his feet and came forward with the book. Remus glimpsed the cover: _Applied Broomstick Mechanics: Physics and Thaumaturgy of Magical Flight_. Sirius thrust the book at Remus, open to a page that seemed to be covered in Greek letters and mathematical symbols, accompanied by an alarmingly sparse number of actual words. "Look! It's the air flow patterns, that explains everything. Well, the air flow, and the fact that the buoyant forces from the old Levitation Charms were never properly balanced for the weight and shape of the bike - you remember how it used to drop and jerk when I accelerated too fast?"

Remus nodded slowly, his stomach lurching at the memory. Sirius began to pace, kicking screwdrivers and bolts aside, holding the book in one hand as if it were the Holy Writ of Merlin, waving the other hand excitedly. "And there's the problem of the turbulence eddies around the Air-Shield Charms - never did get that straightened out, that's why we were always battered side to side when we turned - I have to use a modified Buffering Bewitchment to set up the balanced pressure gradient…"

Sipping his tea, Remus grinned. He hadn't the slightest idea what the hell Sirius was on about, but he knew it was a good thing. Leaning in the doorway with the morning sun on his back, he listened to Sirius' nonsensical chatter mingle with the birds outside and the music from the turntable. Forces and torques, gravity and buoyancy, pressure and velocity - the words flowed over Remus like the warm summer breeze.

There is nothing more Sirius, he thought, than childlike joy in magical concepts most wizards couldn't even name, much less apply to their illegally-charmed Muggle motorbikes.

There was no _click_ this time, no obvious settling of rigid pieces into preformed places. Remus breathed in the steam from his tea and thought, it's more like a slow relaxation, a gentle adjustment. Perhaps _Advanced Broomstick Mechanics_ is right after all. Perhaps a repair isn't all we need; perhaps we also need a restoration of balance.

The balance that had been destroyed so many years ago, wildly skewed by a madman with a terrifying vision - perhaps only now that balanced was regained. A rash of funerals two winters ago had given way to a surfeit of springtime weddings; that, Remus knew, was balance. Angry glares and suspicious stares were now faded, replaced in his memory by the look of complete and utter adoration on Tonks' groom's face when she spilled champagne on him at their wedding reception - that was balance. The most important secret kept being the location of the bachelor party photographs that Ron had declared should never, ever, ever, ever, _ever_ be shown to Hermione ("She'll never suspect that _you_ are hiding them," Ron had pointed out astutely. "Even after you told us that story about the homemade moonshine, she still thinks of you as Respectable Professor Lupin."). A photo on the cover of _Quidditch Illustrated_ eliciting a sheepish blush rather than an angry rant from Harry, as well as the admission that he didn't mind so much, being famous, not when it was Quidditch they were talking about. Losing count of the numbers of weeks the _Prophet_ had gone without printing an article about the Death Eater trials. Lips seeking and hands grasping with wonder rather than desperation, breath gasping with laughter instead of anger. Leaving the door unlocked and sleeping soundly.

That was balance.

"Remus?" Sirius stopped pacing and faced him. "What is it?"

Remus set his mug on the work bench, then put his hands on Sirius' waist, leaned forward, and kissed him softly.

The infamous so-called "werewolf hero" living a quiet life in the country, in a cottage so bloody quaint Molly Weasley had squealed with delight when she saw it - that was balance.

Reporters finally growing tired of attempting to interview the only man to ever both escape from Azkaban _and_ come back from the dead - that was balance.

Respected scholars and philosophers pompously declaring the circumstances of that very comeback as the Great Magical Mystery of the Modern Age - well, Remus had to admit that was really more amusing than anything else. He had never worried that anybody would discover exactly what had happened, no matter how persistent the questions. The real story was known to only a few, and the reporters had soon discovered that the legendary Sirius Black himself refused to speak of it, his werewolf companion was just as frustratingly tight-lipped, the erumpents weren't saying a word, and the eccentric Kenyan gamekeeper rumoured to know the truth had sworn before the inquiry of the British Magical Embassy that he had no idea who had turned Investigative Reporter Rita Skeeter and her trusty photographer into leafy acacia trees when they bravely travelled to Africa to uncover the story of the century. (After the conclusion of the inquiry, Remus received a postcard from Nairobi with a single scrawled line: "I tried, but the giraffes wouldn't touch her.")

"Remus." Sirius smiled uncertainly. "What are you thinking about?"

"Giraffes," Remus said. He kissed Sirius again, slowly and gently.

"Giraffes?"

Remus smiled. That look on Sirius' face, that was a look he knew. That was a look of bemused wonder because Remus was acting so bloody daft again, a look of vague impatience because the Black Shadow was waiting to fly, a look of gears turning and thoughts galloping as he tried to remember if there had been any significant conversations about giraffes in the last day or so, the distracted glance at the textbook while some small part of his mind contemplated vectors and air flow.

For the briefest moment, Remus wished the newspaper photographers were still hovering around like gadflies, if only so they could capture Tragic Hero Sirius Black in a moment of such undiluted cerebral speculation, thereby burying his notorious bad-boy image under an avalanche pure nerdiness.

"And breakfast," Remus added. "Would you like eggs?"

"Eggs?"

Remus patted Sirius' shoulder fondly. "Go back to your forces and charms and…stuff." He waved a hand toward the mechanical disarray.

Sirius was already picking up the shiny new ratchet when Remus turned back toward the house. In the shed, Sirius wondered, in a completely tone-deaf, unmelodic fashion, what would happen when he was sixty-four. The birds in the trees around the garden began to protest the butchering of their favourite song, and the cacophony was exactly right. Remus sipped his tea, smiled, and went in to fix breakfast.


End file.
